In Defense Of The Brutality In The ‘Walking Dead’ Season Premiere

“What did you expect?” is an annoying defense that I would not typically put forward, but where it concerns the season premiere of The Walking Dead, “What did you expect?” The Walking Dead essentially delivered what it had been promising for months: A violent, disturbing, grim, and devastating episode that saw not one, but two characters bashed to death with a baseball bat. Was it gruesome? Absolutely. Did it go too far? That depends, I think, on what viewers were expecting from the season premiere.

Fanatics of The Walking Dead, I suspect, were not all that shocked by the events of the episode. Sad? Sure. Grief-stricken? Probably. But shocked by the level of violence? This is a television show in which a kid shot his mother to death after she gave birth to his little sister. This is a show in which Carol shot a teenage girl in the back of the head because she’d lost her marbles. This is a show in which Noah had his flesh ripped from his face by zombies while Glenn looked on less than a foot away, horrified. This is a show in which cannibals cut off Bob’s leg and ate it, in which Rick killed a man by ripping his neck open with his teeth, and in which walkers tore Nicholas apart while he was on top of Glenn. I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of brutal, bloody zombie deaths.

What I found funny was during Talking Dead, Laren Cohen dropped a couple of F-bombs and got nervous for letting those slip. Hardwick, to his credit, said “We all need to be adults here. We just watched two people get their brains bashed in and now people are goin to be offended bc of some curse words?”

Honestly, what do people expect at this point? If you want to quit watching, just quit watching. And when you do, it’s not necessary for you to write a screed informing everybody that you quit watching and why. Because nobody gives a fuck.

That’s the worst thing about the internet. Everybody thinks their boring ass opinions are somehow relevant.

Negan said he was gonna kill someone, and he did? Why the shock, surprise, and outrage? Everyone was burnt out by the Glenn fake death last year, and finished off by season 2 of Fear The Walking Dead, which captured everything bad about the flagship series.

Look, the writing and pacing on the show has been spotty over 6 seasons, and this 7th isn’t going to be the turn around. The show is about people surviving against the worst that humanity has to offer, against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, and sometimes they try to make a point by being sentimental, and sometimes they try to stun you with a gory kill.

Maybe everyone forgot how the show works after 200+ days off the air, the crappy FTWD, and everything else IRL that has overshadowed things lately. They reinvented nothing…its still the same old wheel as before.

I agree with Rowles that complaining about the violence is bs. But I disagree with his other points. I don’t think Kirkman and crew arbitrarily decided to “toy” with us. That’s some paranoid schizophrenic type of thinking. The wait was a minor irritation but it was worth it. I also disagree that Negan taking Rick on a little trip took away from us or the story. It gave us something more interesting than “these two died, everyone’s really sad, Rick will get revenge, see you next week.” Because if that’s what we got you would still poke holes. You needed more time to grief? Get out of here. You wanted a grief-only episode? No zombies. No Negan. Just splat, splat followed by 40 minutes of the cast looking sad. Lol!

The main problem is the narrative has just been dragged way out too long. Where is this group/story going? When the seasons start to become formulaic like it felt to me the first half of last season, the story just begins to feel less compelling to watch.